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Show LI 1 t t ,.1 Little Known Stories , About Well-Known People: i The current March of Dimes cam-' cam-' paign recalls a delightful story l about a grand lady: A New York merchant once approached FDR's mother at a banquet and offered to contribute $500 to the Warm Springs Foundation if she would pose for a picture with his mother. Sarah Roosevelt replied she would be willing will-ing to pose even if he didn't contribute con-tribute any money. . . . The merchant mer-chant then said he would give $1,000. . . . "And now," he added, "I'll bring my mother over here. She is 92, and this will be the biggest thrill in her life." "In that case," said the 84-year-old Mrs. Roosevelt, "I'll go to her I'm younger." While working as an editor for several leading magazines, Theodore Theo-dore Dreiser wrote a fabulous amount of wonderful wordage short stories, poems, plays, essays, social studies and novels, Including his most famous work, "An American Amer-ican Tragedy." In '27 he visited the Soviet Union as a guest of the government. When he stopped in England on his way back, Mr. Churchill asked him, "Well, what do you think of Russia?" "I told him," Dreiser said to Bob van Gelder), "that I thought It was a wonderful country, a wonderful system." "Nonsense," Churchill said, "it won't last seven years." Decades ago, Clarence Darrow, the famed lawyer, was the principal speaker at a woman's club. After his address he found himself in conversation con-versation with a few ladies who insisted in-sisted on discussing birth control. "Mr. Darrow," said one, "what do you think of birth control for the masses?" "My dear lady," replied the famous fa-mous man, "whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was the fifth." The late George Norrls made a speech In which he pointed out that mankind's scientific and mechanical progress hasn't prevented the barbarism bar-barism of war. . . . "We have wars," said Norris, "because the human race has learned how to improve everything except people." Neatest comment on Elsenhower's Elsenhow-er's outline of demobilization plans came from one of the. boys on the GI Liberation Committee In Paris. Gen. Ike had told Congress: "When you see firemen playing checkers In the firehouse you don't send them home because there's nothing to do. And it's the same in Germany. The soldiers may be sitting around with nothing to do or so they think. But their 'presence there is very necessary." neces-sary." y "Mebbe so," said the soldier (who'd been told five times of a sailing sail-ing date, only to have it changed), "but even a fireman gets disgusted disgust-ed when there are nothing but false alarms!" This Is a Mark Twain tale we haven't come across before. . . . When Mark was at the height of his career he Informed a friend: "It took me ten years to discover that I had no talent for writing." "And you gave it up?" "Oh, not By that time I was too famous!" "As long as we're on puns," adds Frank Case's son, Carroll, "the winner win-ner and still champion is' old Samuel Sam-uel Johnson, who was approached by a would-be wit in the Mermaid Tavern (the Algonquin of Its day). The wag said: 'Now admit it, Sam; the only reason you don't like puns ig that you can't make them.' ... To which Johnson punned: 'Sir, If I were pun-ished for every pun I shed, I'd have no puny shed In which to rest this punish head.' " That reminds us of our pet pun. . . . "A pun," someone said,- "is the lowest form of wit, pun my soul It is!" Quotation Marksmanship: Dorothy Doro-thy Dix: Drying a widow's tears is one of the most dangerous occupations occupa-tions known to man. . . . Geo. S. Perry: Tugboats shooting the air full of sharp, white toots. . . . Faul Ernst: Looking crisp and cool as though she had slept on mint leaves. . . . F. E. Jones: Impatient soldiers overseas waiting for Returnity. . . . Ben Grauer: He rode to the bottom bot-tom on one-way pawntickets. . . . Jack Marshall: He's a patriot with the accent on the riot. . . . Thoreau: I would not talk so much about myself my-self if there were anybody else whom I knew so well. . . La Rochefoucauld: Roche-foucauld: "In their first passion women love their lovers. In all others oth-ers they love love. When Winston Churchill debarked from the Queen Elizabeth in N. Y. recently a reporter asked why he wasn't going to defend British policy pol-icy in Palestine at the Garden's "That We May Live" rally. "I'm only going to vacation here two months," he replied. The reporter observed that most U. S. pollticos are lucky to vaca- . tlon one month. Churchill bit into his cigar and quipped, "If I were a politician, I'd still be Prime Minister." |
